Comparing Cognitive and Psychological Factors in Virtual Reality and Real Environments: A Cave Automatic Virtual Environment Experimental Study

The emergence of Building Information Modelling, Internet of Things, and Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVEs) has created new opportunities for remote monitoring and decision-making in the operational built environment, yet empirical evidence supporting their use as alternatives to on-site observation remains limited. This study evaluates task and human performance in a controlled experiment comparing a CAVE with a real-world setting (n = 26). Situation awareness, workload, anxiety, presence, usability, and user experience were measured across conditions. Participants in the CAVE demonstrated substantially higher situation awareness (M = 92.1%) than those in the real-world condition (M = 56.8%), alongside significantly lower overall workload (NASA-TLX weighted workload = 38.3 vs. 53.8). Anxiety remained consistently low in the CAVE (ΔSTAI = –1.0), whereas participants in the real-world condition exhibited higher baseline anxiety followed by a large reduction during task execution (ΔSTAI = –13.2). The CAVE also elicited high levels of spatial presence, involvement, and realism relative to comparable projection-based systems, while usability ratings (SUS) were above industry benchmarks (M = 74.2). Together, these findings indicate that controlled immersive representations of built environments can support sensemaking and reduce extraneous cognitive load relative to live, uncontrolled on-site observation, with important implications for remote facilities management and operational decision-making.